The coup

It has been a long time coming, but it is finally here, a day to celebrate. Today, Congress [was to] put the final nail in Trump’s presidency, amid the objecting and the moaning, the fretting, and the crying of Trump’s most abject toadies. I hate that part of it, and I love it. That the Republican Party has decided to drag the country through one more ordeal is odious. But the discomfiture of Cruz, Scalisi, and their ilk fills me with delight. Their pain is my pleasure. After four long years of outrage after outrage, lie after lie, cruelty after cruelty, I will allow myself my Schadenfreude—”the experience of pleasure, joy, or self-satisfaction that comes from learning of or witnessing the troubles, failures, or humiliation of another”—to run wild for one day.

But the main source of joy today is that two of the biggest scoundrels in American politics will soon be out of a job, ejected by the people exercising their voting rights under the constitution. Trump will no longer be president. With the victory of Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in the Senate runoff race in Georgia, the despicable Mr. No, Mitch McConnell, will lose the job of Senate Majority Leader. Let the Republicans have their futile tantrum.

Yet, we cannot ignore the ominous air that hangs over the nation’s capital as the mob of fanatics convened by Trump storms the Capitol, breaching the barricades, as I write this at 2:20 p.m. on January 6, 2021. As I get ready to email my column, I trust there is enough security to keep out the barbarians. And I remember that I always knew that it would come to something like this.

On January 23, 2017, upon Donald Trump’s inauguration, I wrote a column for Progreso Weekly (“The Calamity Commences; The Resistance Rears Up”). It began:

“A sense of the tragic pervaded events in Washington, D.C. Friday as Donald Trump was inaugurated to the presidency. I am not using the word tragic in the clichéd way it is often used to describe anything from a rejection letter from a prestigious private elementary school to a racist massacre in a Charleston black church.

“I mean tragic in the way it was embodied in the work of the great Greek tragedians, specifically Euripides. In his plays, as the drama unfolds, the players on the stage are blind to what the spectators already sense. Controlled not by human will and intention but by the Fates, the events set in motion can only have one outcome, a terrible one.”

The Donald Trump presidency has brought tragedy from start to finish. From day one, when the administration lied about the size of the crowd thus establishing deception as Trump’s norm for the next four years, to the day when he finally leaves power lying still about having won an election that he lost badly and leaving in his trail a tragic wake of more than 400,000 of the dead and the dying.

In between the founding lie, meant to convey the sense of an overwhelming popularity he never had, and the final lie, charging a massive electoral fraud that did not happen, there was a blizzard of lies, big and small, including a bizarre one meant to falsify the path of a hurricane, many vile lies, and even homicidal lies.

Absurd lies were one thing, tragicomic. The vile lies, such as slandering new immigrants as criminals, were something else. The pandemic made clearer than ever that the people Trump maligned are those who grow our food, cut our meat, keep the grocery stores and the restaurants open. They subsidize our middle-class lifestyles in normal times and enable us to stay safe at home at their peril in pandemic times.

Trump’s homicidal lies, the ones that cost hundreds of thousands of people their lives or their health for a lifetime, are his about the pandemic of Coronavirus SARS 2—COVID for short. The lies were multiple, but they responded to a single, simple logic. Let’s not say or do anything that will mess up the economy, which is my one and only argument for reelection after an otherwise miserable presidency. But nothing could be done to curb the pandemic without depressing the economy.

So, nothing or almost nothing was done. The virus roamed, cavorted, wrecked. The malignant logic that led to the criminal malfeasance of doing nothing was justified through lies that led true believers and many other people to their graves. There was a fatal flaw in Trump’s calculation.

Most people believed the scientists, the evidence of the reality of the illness growing every day before their eyes. They disbelieved Trump’s lies. Moreover, many Americans understood that for COVID to have been a hoax, there had to have been an international conspiracy involving every country in the world, from Russia to Italy, from China to Iceland, from Iran to the Vatican. The probability of such a coalition is vanishingly small.

Too many people understood therefore that following the lackadaisical example of the president and acting as if there was no COVID would be risking their lives for nothing. Trump ended in the worst of both words. Half-assed public health measures and partial lockdowns hardly slowed the virus. Most people decided they would stay safe at home rather than go out to be sacrificed on the altar of the economy and Trump’s reelection.

Check. Mate. Game.

*****

TRUMP TERRORISM

Below are photos taken on Wednesday (Jan. 6) of the storming of the U.S. Capitol by Trumpsters from around the U.S. gathered in Washington, DC, attempting to violently overturn the November presidential election.